HealthCare.gov glitches signal bigger woes? Your Say

President Obama spoke Monday about the rocky rollout of the Affordable Care Act, calling the issues with HealthCare.gov inexcusable. Comments from Facebook are edited for clarity and grammar:

Private company steps in

The government can't get the website for the health insurance exchanges right and has to bring in a private company to fix it. So the government can't do something right, but the private sector can? What a revelation! Maybe we should let private companies handle all health care?

— Kevin C Shadden

To hear conservatives mocking President Obama for bringing in private enterprise to fix a problem is just priceless. Private enterprise was harnessed to win World War II; it is one of the USA's greatest assets.

Obama is in the business of fixing problems, but Republicans are in the business of creating obstacles.

— Chris Reising

Obamacare critics

The administration says Obamacare is more than the glitches on the website. Yes, Obamacare is indeed more than a website. It is a tax increase and a pay reducer. It is a job killer and a benefits destroyer.

And the biggest irony is that it is anything but "affordable," because it takes so much money away from me, through insurance deductibles and co-pays, that having the coverage is essentially worthless.

— Douglas Miller

We've had no change in our health coverage or cost at all. The only people making this law difficult to understand and enforce are the conservatives who want to see Obama fail at everything.

— Bill Cain

A complex system

This isn't just a matter of too much traffic for a website. There is the issue of programming and the complexity of connecting many databases on different systems.

It's going to take six months at least to rectify the problem, if all database systems can be connected.

— Jeff Drebit

The root of the problem is not the software but simply the complexity of this law, which no lawmaker completely read or understood. More than 10,000 pages of regulations make it nearly impossible to automate the system.

Let's rename the law from Affordable Care Act to something more appropriate.

— Harish Gopalakrishna

Letters to the editor:

"You are OK. ... I got you." These were President Obama's words near the end of his recent speech on health care to the woman behind him who looked like she was about to pass out. We learned later that she is pregnant and diabetic, and that she had been able to get health care insurance because of the Affordable Care Act.

Here was the president of United States, turning away from the cameras, to put his arm around a woman who was about to fall. It is so symbolic of what he's trying to do for the least among us. He's ready to catch us when we fall. That's the kind of person he is. That's what the Affordable Care Act is all about.

Rita Bourke; Nashville

The nightmare that is the HealthCare.gov website is nothing less than a technological Hurricane Katrina. Unlike a natural disaster, though, this one was man-made and could have been prevented.

Calling any government office has always been a challenge, usually requiring long waits and having to choose poorly defined options. Once you make your way through to a live person, you're often greeted with impatience.

We have a right to ask: If the government can't get this right, how can it get the rest of the health care law right? Something as simple as opening the site to people alphabetically over several weeks could have made a big difference.

As a retired longtime manager of information technology, I know it didn't have to be this way. At least these people aren't building airplanes.